How can we build a better healthcare system? Nurses are essential to efforts around the world to transform healthcare in ways that improve access and outcomes, including initiatives to streamline healthcare processes to be more efficient and effective.
Central to those efforts is technology. From generative AI to wearable technologies and beyond, the speed of innovation continues to accelerate, and nurses play a critical role in the development and deployment of these solutions.
Enter the nurse informaticist. Nursing informatics is an interdisciplinary field that draws from nursing, computer science, information science, cognitive science, human factors, organizational science, and health policy. Nurse informaticists synthesize clinical skills with experience in computer and information science to improve patient care and health systems through software implementations and optimizations, data science projects, communications solutions and much more.
In research conducted by Johnson & Johnson and the American Nurses Association and the American Organization for Nursing Leadership called Accelerating Nursing, Transforming Healthcare (ANTH), nursing informatics was identified as a key avenue for improving healthcare delivery across facets within health organizations: mapping workflow and care plans, implementing new staffing models, and even reducing administrative burden on nurses and other clinicians.
"Nurses and nurse informaticists need to be at the forefront of discussions, ensuring that systems implemented are in the best interest of both providers and patients,” said Kathleen McGrow, Microsoft’s chief nursing information officer. “Their unique insights and experiences are invaluable in shaping decisions that directly affect the quality of care and patient safety."
Here are a few ways nursing informatics can transform healthcare, benefiting the healthcare workforce, patients, and health systems alike.
AI solutions can reduce the administrative burden of documentation, while supporting nurse-led care
Documentation is a critical part of healthcare—it captures details of patients’ histories and the care they receive by gathering evidence of essential elements, like patient assessments, teaching, care planning, quality, and even billing. However, as nurses know, documentation can be a huge administrative burden, since it pulls time from other important endeavors, like direct patient care, interacting with families, and the “thinking time” that can spur innovation of new methods and models.
Data is vital, but there need to be efficient ways of capturing relevant information to not overburden nurses or pull them away from important work.
One nurse-led solution? AutoChart – the 2023 NurseHack4Health Pitch-A-Thon Awardee team.
AutoChart is an AI-enabled documentation solution that uses natural language processing to capture patient assessments at the point of care. Speech is recorded and transcribed to text in real time, and AI extracts and organizes keywords for the nurse to review and verbalize any additional assessment data.
The solution also generates handover information automatically, saving up to 10 minutes per patient per 24-hour shift, according to the team, as well as creating automatic shift summaries.
Developing good documentation models can be a joint effort between health system leadership, nurses, and nursing informatics, said Emily Barey, MSN, Vice President for Nursing at Epic Systems, an ANTH survey participant. “Documentation can in part be alleviated through collaboration – it’s critical to meet the information needs of the downstream reader, such as physicians, therapists, case managers and fellow nurses.”
Data analysis can enhance patient care and improve health equity
Health system data is increasingly instrumental in filling gaps in healthcare access and outcomes. The not-so-easy trick is to transform vast amounts of information into something informative and usable.
Health systems can leverage informatics in many ways, but it generally involves combining electronic medical records (EMRs), staffing and other data sources to make fast, real-time decisions for patients.
Virtual models of care, for instance, can offer remote monitoring to patients with both acute and chronic conditions – like nurse Michele Santoro, who helped to create a remote device monitoring clinic at Yale New Haven Healthcare. Santoro and her team remotely monitor heart patients, and if abnormal activity is detected, they triage – either directing them to an outpatient clinic for IV diuretics to prevent readmission, or to the emergency room for more serious episodes.
Informatics can also help provide care to patients who have different language needs, who are hearing-impaired, who require specialists not available in their areas, who are at risk for certain illnesses or mental health issues, or who have a range of other needs or preferences.
In addition, tools like scheduling aggregators can optimize access to care by using limited clinical resources in the most effective way. “The entry point into the health system is one of the most important,” said ANTH participant Kristi Henderson, DNP, NP-C, FAAN, CEO, MedExpress and Optum Virtual Care and senior vice president of the Center for Digital Health at Optum. “Data insights can match patients with the most appropriate and available clinician based on the patient’s preferences, location and clinical need, whether that be for an in-person visit or a virtual visit.”
She added that a data-driven system can determine things a patient may not be able to, like what kind of provider is best. “I may not know whether I need to see a psychiatrist, health coach, or social worker or whether I should see this clinician in a clinic, an acute care facility or if I can get my issue resolved through a virtual visit,” said Henderson. “A data-driven system removes the friction with this type of decision-making.
As data-driven models and digitally enabled health systems advance, nurses and other clinicians have more tools to minimize many of the disparities related to social determinants of health, such as geographic and transportation barriers, added Henderson. “Technology enables us to address many of the inequities that too often exist in the health system.”
Building the future of healthcare
Informatics will remain critical as nurses continue to lead new strategies for delivering safe and effective care in the coming years – and it will help demonstrate the value of nurse-led care.
“It will require informatics to optimize how we work differently in these models,” said Barey. “Nurses are leading the way.”
Nurses are innovating, supporting and implementing novel tech and AI solutions for clinical and patient care challenges. Johnson & Johnson is committed to advocating for, elevating and empowering nurses as they transform healthcare and change human health for the better. The Accelerating Nursing, Transforming Healthcare research provides strong evidence of the impact of the nursing profession and nurses’ capacity to harness new strategies to improve healthcare.
